Gospel Delivers Lakeland Pastor From KKK to God

Saturday

Richard Harris, pastor of Living Hope Community Church, has been out of the Ku Klux Klan for more than 30 years now, and just published a book about his years involved.

The photo shows a skinny, shaggy-haired teenager with huge 1970s-era glasses. He's wearing a white satin robe and on it is the insignia of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Rev. Richard C. Harris shakes his head slightly.

"It's hard to believe it was really me because I don't have those beliefs anymore," he said.

Harris has a lot of memorabilia from his years in the Klan - the white robe of a county officer, the red robe of a state officer, old manuals showing the secret passwords, signs and countersigns exchanged by Klansmen, racist propaganda. The one thing he doesn't have is the green robe of the Grand Dragon, or statewide chief, of Indiana, an office he held for two years as a young man.

On the day he quit the Klan, just 24 hours after undergoing a religious conversion, he gave the robe back to the man who recruited him.

Harris, pastor of Living Hope Community Church in Lakeland, has been out of the Klan for more than 30 years now. He has been speaking out against the Klan and its racism for a long time, but he just published a book about his years in the KKK, "One Nation Under Curse," which has landed him guest appearances on numerous nationally syndicated radio talk shows.

The "curse" he refers to - a word employed by the Klan with pride - is racism. With the election of Barack Obama as president, some might think that racism in America is a thing of the past, but Harris emphatically disagrees.

"The Emancipation Proclamation didn't do it. The Civil War didn't do it. The civil rights movement didn't do it. I'm sorry, but a black man in the White House is not going to change the racial tensions inbred in this country," he said.

Harris' book is a sometimes harrowing, sometimes comic account of life in an organization that is a dangerous combination of neighborhood club and al-Qaida. As he tells it, they're hometown terrorists, "some of the meanest, nastiest, roughest men in the country," engaged in a wide range of shady and violent activity, occasionally directed at its own members.

Harris said he was once grazed in the arm by a bullet fired by one of his own bodyguards who wanted to move up in the organization.

"We were taught fear, intimidation and violence. You had to keep the troops loyal to you. Often I would have a gun shoved in my face by people higher up for showing disrespect to their ideas or wishes," he said.

lured

As a neglected and bullied teenager in the city of Kokomo, Ind., Harris was lured into the Klan and groomed for top office at a young age because of his speaking abilities. His mother died when he was 14, leaving him with two much older brothers and a father struggling to run two businesses.

Harris said the Klan had long been active in the Midwest, the result of Southern whites migrating to the area looking for jobs. His great-grandfather had been a Klan member, and Harris had an adolescent fascination with the group, although his father had warned him the Klan was full of troublemakers.

"Their slogan was 'Be a man, join the Klan.' For someone being picked on every day, that sounded pretty inviting," he said.

When blacks began attending his middle school following desegregation, Harris said he found a group he could pick on and used his speech class to begin giving talks about the history of the Klan and ideas of racial superiority. Word got around, and when he was 16, he was enticed to meet a regional Klan leader through the man's daughter.

"The Klan appealed to me. They said, 'We're going to be your family. No one's ever going to pick on you again.' If the church youth group down the street had shown an interest, I might never have joined the Klan," he said.

The author of a journalistic account of the Klan said Harris' experience was typical.

"A lot of the rank and file ... are losers. It's an organization they could get into because they couldn't get into anything else. Some are there to do violence. Others are not, they're just lost people, looking for something to belong to," said Patsy Sims, author of "The Klan" (University of Kentucky Press, 1978), from her home in Washington.

Under the patronage of the Klan leader who recruited him, Harris was appointed Grand Dragon of Indiana - the largest Klan north of the Mason-Dixon line, by his estimate - at age 18. But within two years, he had begun to regret his involvement in the organization.

"I began to question how long I was going to be alive. As I was maturing a little bit, I saw what I had gotten was not going to be able to sustain me. But I didn't think there was any way out," he said.

'They had lied to me'

Harris was looking to move up in the Klan, and he was offered the post of national chaplain. He had very little religious training growing up, but to qualify for chaplain, he began to read the Gospel of John and was shocked at what he read. He had heard Klan chaplains quote scripture to justify racist ideology, but Harris found something different.

"They had lied to me. I read the whole gospel and found incident after incident where Jesus showed love, not hate," he said.

So profoundly shaken was Harris that the next day he called the Klan's Midwestern regional leader and told him he was quitting. It entailed risk - you don't just resign from such a high post in the Klan - but, afraid he might take others with him, leaders ordered that Harris be left alone, and for years he kept quiet about his involvement in the Klan.

Harris went on to join the Free Methodist church, earn college and graduate degrees and enter the ministry. But it wasn't easy to leave behind the racism he had learned in the Klan. He understood intellectually that all people were brothers and sisters, he said, but he continued to live in a predominantly white world. Then he was transferred by Free Methodist officials to a multiracial church in West Palm Beach, and he began to work with and befriend people of other races and cultures.

"God thrust me into that. What the Klan called 'the curse' was being broken. It took some immersion to bring it from intellectual to personal understanding," he said.

Harris points to his friend Arnold Macon, who joined Living Hope Community Church with his family 13 years ago. Macon, who is black, has been a coach and teacher in Polk County schools and currently has a business partnership with Harris.

The two run Stars for College, which matches high school athletes with college scholarship opportunities. Macon said he had a "mixed reaction" after first hearing Harris talk about his years in the Klan but came to see Harris' change of heart was genuine.

"I don't judge anyone's past history. It was the way he was brought up. God made us so we can make corrections," he said. "He's been very candid and honest. That's the main thing. I respected him for that."

NO SECRETS

Harris has made no secret of his past, referring to it in his sermons and in speaking engagements. He released "One Nation Under Curse" as a self-published book (available through Amazon.com and a Web site, www.onenationundercurse.com) last month. He said he tells children about the dangers of peer pressure, bullying and low self-esteem because that is what drew him into the Klan.

He has a different message for parents - make efforts to befriend people of other cultures and races as an example to your children.

"Until we get to the point in this country where we can have friends of Asian or African descent, children are going to continue the racial tensions exactly as they have been since the country was founded," he said. "The radical ones are going to join the Klan."

[ Cary McMullen can be reached at cary.mcmullen@theledger.com or 863-802-7509. His blog, Scriptorium: A Religion Panorama, can be read at religion.blogs.theledger.com. ]

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